

## Perceptions of Peace in South Sudan Surveys

### About Perceptions of Peace
This repository provides outputs from a longitudinal survey on Perceptions of Peace in South Sudan from 2021-2025, led by Dr Jan Pospisil (PeaceRep; Coventry University), David Deng (Detcro Research), Christopher Oringa (University of Juba) and Sophia Dawkins (Columbia University), funded by UK FCDO, USIP and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation South Sudan office.

The six-wave survey collection recorded the views from 22,677 respondents 2021-2025 across 29 locations in 15 counties in South Sudan. Respondents were asked questions about their daily experience of safety based on indicators of everyday peace. They also shared their views on a range of related topics, including levels and perceptions of peace in South Sudan, and elections and governance arrangements, among others.

The study drew from the Everyday Peace Indicator (EPI) methodology to develop measures of everyday safety through interviews and focus groups across five of the survey locations in January and February 2020. This produced five questions which were asked in each survey. 

Perceptions of Peace is a key component of PeaceRep’s South Sudan programme, which also explores public authority in South Sudan, the key dynamics between Sudan and South Sudan and their impact on each other’s transition process, and the role of different types of financial flows on governance outcomes. See here for more information: https://peacerep.org/perceptions-peace-south-sudan/


### Data Provided
The data provided in this respository has been cleaned and collated by Niamh Henry (University of Edinburgh - PeaceRep Research Fellow). If any issues with the data please send an email to: nhenry2@ed.ac.uk

There is an individual file for each of the six survey waves. Each xlsx file contains two sheets: data and documentation. The documentation file provides the associated question to the column name in the data sheet, and marks if it is a scaled question (i.e. using a form of likert scale), binary, and denotes the waves in which the question was asked. If the question is scaled, both the word and the numeric formats are provided. If the question has options, binary columns for responses are provided in addition to a combined column that contains all the responses seperated by a comma. 

If the question was asked in more than one wave, they are combined in the file 'ssd_surveys_longitudinal_wave_1_6.xlsx', to enable longitudinal insights over time. 

The six waves of the survey were conducted in the following time-frames:
Wave 1: Aug-Sep 2021
Wave 2: Feb-Apr 2022
Wave 3: May-Jun 2022
Wave 4: Mar-Apr 2023
Wave 5: Mar-Apr 2024
Wave 6: Apr-June 2025

### Sampling 
The survey counties (referred to as ‘locations’) are a convenience sample of areas that represent principal regions and conflict theatres in South Sudan. Within each county, the team adopted an approximately self-weighting tratified random sampling approach to select individuals. Simple random sampling was not possible due to the absence of recent census data. Therefore, the team divided each county into environments (urban, rural and IDP camps) and evaluated their relative population densities using the GRID3 South Sudan Settlement Extents, Version 01.01 dataset.2

Informed by this data, the research team randomly sampled map coordinates in urban and rural areas. Male-female enumerator pairs began each work day at one of these randomlyselected map coordinates, and then followed a random walk assisted by a smartphone phone app. Respondents from IDP camps were sampled using the most up-to-date United
Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) POC Head Counts and International Organization for Migration (IOM) IDP Site Multi-Sector Needs, Vulnerabilities data. 

Enumerators administered the survey anonymously on smartphones using KoboToolbox survey technology. This allowed a high-level of data protection and real-time monitoring of responses and enumerator daily work. 

### Location Data
The the exact co-ordinates of where the respondents were surveyed are not available in these files, however, the location name is included, and the locations have been geocoded using PRIO Grids (https://grid.prio.org/#/). This allows interoperability with other data sources that provide PRIO-Grid ID's. Adjoining geojson files with the polygons of the grids are included in this repository. One file contains the unique grids with their associated prio grid ID's (gid) and the other provides a record for each respondent, their survey ID and the relevant grid. There is a 'precision' column that denotes how precise the grid location is (if it is based on exact locations or central point of the location name - see documentation sheet in files for more detail).
 